essays | fiction | poetry | photography | art
When I arrive, you won’t be sitting at the kitchen granite table, where on rainy days we
shared pumpkin soup. I would not need to rehearse what to tell you at the granite table, with
no one around.
First frost of the year
and the river is submerged in mist;
a blaze of sunlight
melting everything to dew.
Nairobi, Kenya, Sunday, 1st August, 1982
I was twelve years old when I first ate khichdi for ten days in a row. It was also the first time I heard the words ‘coup d’etat.’ That Sunday, my mother came into my bedroom at three in the morning and whispered I should move to her room. In her bed, behind a locked door, we heard gun shots.
are fig leaves poisonous
good first foods
solar powered roaster
basic metallurgy
I am the daughter of a man with a TripTik. You may not know what a TripTik is, or you may understand it to be a triptych, a work of art made up of three panels, often hinged together in a sacred altarpiece.
I get lost in the soft tips of the cedar tree
hanging over the fence
My parents melt into deckchairs
like American cheese
The fact that we’d never visited Mexico apart from a couple of long-ago weeks in Tulum, Yucatan might explain my scanty knowledge of El Dia de Los Muertos or the Day of the Dead. I knew it wasn’t connected to Ireland’s Samhain or All Hallow’s Eve, beloved in my childhood.
Our traveling was so fluid it’s like we lived nowhere in particular.
Sipping on our black coffee, my grandad and I sit together in his living room every morning. We drift between comfortable silence, where I return to my book, he returns to his paper, and short bursts of conversation. A new restaurant is opening in town, he says. I called the bank earlier, I say. What time do you start work, he asks. Yes, I will remember my umbrella, I respond.
I find a seat,
hold a headache in my hands, cradle it like a rock
between fingers, think about how this birthday
will be soup and crackers and cancelled plans.
In my earliest memories, I am eating Chinese food. My great-aunt’s house in the suburbs outside Boston is split-level and her mother, my great-grandmother, lives in the lower level. You enter through the front door onto a landing between the two halves of the house, and if you walk downstairs, her kitchen will be directly in front of you.
I remember the shape of the word rainbow
on her puckered mouth, how we sounded
it out from my bedroom window.
How did a barrel-chested man learn
this magic? Softened like golden butter
in a dizzy aftermath, he did too many wars perhaps.
We are three siblings, scattered across continents, each of us carrying the taste of a different kitchen.
Rain upon me your turbulent tales of locker-side loves,
the gossip of girls whose braces still encase their molars
I look at a photo of my Hungarian grandfather and his compatriots in Carr Bank Park, posing by the flowerbeds on Woodhouse Road, and know it is possible to belong to more than a single place.
Just as Hemlock
digs its graves in the
carrot family plot
because there’s no way he would ever find it,
being interested only in dinner/work/breakfast
/work/sex on demand/sleep/work.
the problem with mici is
they’re all so good
that they don’t even ask you
what you’re ordering
So next time you feel so anxious that you can hardly unlock the door,
remember that the world holds your feet
I see you standing there – starch white lungi draped
7AM freshly shaved – wooden spoon in hand
Commanding your caramelising populace.
one bright red strawberry on the strawberry plant
mist still low, tangled in the branches of olive trees
the way the pomegranates hang low
with the burden of their own weight
Faces are remembered, words spoken; that brief encounter at the fair, the smell of old sunlight, a slow night train.
How she longs for the asteroid to come, to show them how little they controlled anything.
My family observes the emu cage. Beaks so vengeful, I realise we’re taking the piss.
at least the colour I’m told is
robin’s egg blue, like
boy-baby blankets, like
deep breaths of sunshine.
It’s these questions I have. (An astral whodunnit: a whydreamit).
They’re small animals
wriggling to get out
Just let us touch the crust, they say
feel it crackle
I know it’s over when I picture the train carriage
it’s an old-fashioned carriage with burgundy velvet seats
a little room in my memory.
You are sun-skinned, but my half
of the planet is tumbling into the dark.
Family is my way of honouring the Filipino spirit, where the bond of unity, the guidance of elders, and the hope carried by the younger generation come together to form a love that is simple, yet profound—one that transcends individuality and connects us all.
It is an old superstition.
The mirror, and the room
dark behind it but for the
flickering of a few fading
candles.
My memories can be quantified in cups of tea,
and meat pies filled perfectly, slumped against
a mountain of mash
Like thirst – a need to quench, slake, state:
first hearse, first coffin and pallbearing.
I become great at darts, a phenomenon
on dart circuits, earning enough from darts
to pay for lobster rolls
maybe they look down
at their bodies as they left them
in neat rows, heads of wheat
crackling green and gold
She arms herself with the metal pipe of the Electrolux
with the precision of a marksman
(coffee, pastry,
food-words,
unfettered time)
Words words words black as a cat.
I just saw you in the periphery of
Manet’s Olympia — or maybe Cézanne’s
…across the bitter world, a sweet gift from Pachamama
like my father who taught me to feel
and press its skin: a map of lost worlds
They have agreed that this is an emergency. Signs need not be heeded in an emergency, they’re quite sure.
We’re hit with a waft of espresso. The thunder of grinding coffee beans. The high-pitched hiss of steamed milk. Our wish is granted.
I told no one. Not my parents, not my older sister, not my little brother. I locked myself in the bathroom while my mother stirred tomato sauce and tasted spaghetti (we did not like al dente).
The water is so clear, the sunlight snakes across the rocks on the seabed, I can see the relaxed mottled skin of her arms below the ripples of surface, her arms leisurely open and close like silky breath.
I do not know whether to say that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie saved me or to ascribe it to God as we always do in Nigeria. When we studied so hard and passed an exam, we say it was God who did it…It is popular in Nigeria for Nigerian hospitals to display on their signboards: We take care, but only God heals.
You’re on the decline, she said. I had come for a frozen shoulder. I didn’t even know that could happen. Apparently they just stop working, turn solid, you have to take your other arm, lift them up, plop them down and then they lay there useless. Right now one of my arm pits has deodorant on it, the other does not.
